Friday, March 23, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Today is Meat Out Day. And also Steak and Blowjob Day. Following on the heels of St. Let’s All Get Hammered Day, it’s like Once Upon a Time either Happily Ever After or GOD NO.
I actually had steak for the first time in an eon (I feel like I ate one of Elmer’s pets whole), a date at the dress-coded Buffalo Club with The Nun and the union. Union guys – it’s a quandary. I mean, you have to be on their team, but every time they gather, there is at least one of them wearing a gout sandal, bet your life on it, probably the president of your local chapter.
Meanwhile, it is 15 degrees here this evening. I tried. I always try, but let’s face it I start out half a bubble off plumb to begin with, so going stark raving nuts is so right there.
I actually had steak for the first time in an eon (I feel like I ate one of Elmer’s pets whole), a date at the dress-coded Buffalo Club with The Nun and the union. Union guys – it’s a quandary. I mean, you have to be on their team, but every time they gather, there is at least one of them wearing a gout sandal, bet your life on it, probably the president of your local chapter.
Meanwhile, it is 15 degrees here this evening. I tried. I always try, but let’s face it I start out half a bubble off plumb to begin with, so going stark raving nuts is so right there.
.
Clawing the inside of the buried box, nearing frantic.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
TJ-isms:
If you burped any louder you could reach jet propulsion and accidentally blow your head off.
You got a problem with that?
Nope!
What’s that smell?, curly ick face, taking a piss.
Shampoo? I’m washing my hair, clearly.
It doesn’t smell very good, it smells girly.
Well your buttcrack doesn’t smell very good.
Smells good to me!
I thought we’d go to the Botanical Gardens.
Nooooooooooooo.
O cmon, all this snow is depressing the shit outa me.
You swore.
And?
I hate the Garden Thing, it’s just a bunch of plants lying around.
That’s the point, plants flowers LIFE and all that.
What’s the big deal about being alive?
It’s hard if you think about it—all this snow is covering up plants that want to live again, that takes Will Power.
O anything can be alive, even Grandma Jody!
(if you're not dead)
Friday, March 16, 2007
Thursday, March 15, 2007
self help reading + music
From An American Childhood, Annie Dillard:
Children 10 [3] years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning; in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills.
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in.
“Lie on your back,” my mother said. She was kind, imaginative. She had joined me in one of the side yards. “Look at the clouds and figure out what they look like. A hat? I see a camel.”
Must I? Could this be anybody’s idea of something worth doing?
The interior life is often stupid. It’s egotism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant takes, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.
The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, and I myself was one such item—a child walking up the sidewalk, whom anyone could see or ignore. The things in the world did not necessarily cause my overwhelming feelings; the feelings were inside me, beneath my skin, behind my ribs, within my skull. They were even, to some extent, under my control.
Willy Mason - When The River Moves On
Children 10 [3] years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning; in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills.
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in.
“Lie on your back,” my mother said. She was kind, imaginative. She had joined me in one of the side yards. “Look at the clouds and figure out what they look like. A hat? I see a camel.”
Must I? Could this be anybody’s idea of something worth doing?
The interior life is often stupid. It’s egotism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant takes, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.
The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, and I myself was one such item—a child walking up the sidewalk, whom anyone could see or ignore. The things in the world did not necessarily cause my overwhelming feelings; the feelings were inside me, beneath my skin, behind my ribs, within my skull. They were even, to some extent, under my control.
Willy Mason - When The River Moves On
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
"diddly squat”
Soak up the Sun ( laa la la laa)
bonus Psapp - Hi
p.s. Ann Coulter looks like what I imagine the horses looked like in Lodz just before they had to eat them
Monday, March 12, 2007
doggedly, Husky Rescue - Summertime Cowboy (Mocky Remix)
bonus -Robyn- Crash and Burn Girl
Bow Wow Wow - I Want Candy (Marie Antoinette remix)
Saturday, March 10, 2007
It got warm yesterday, sort of. Then it bit me. Cold again, just like that, like a spanking. [grrrrrrstuuuubbbooorn] I’m repainting some more. I am baking things and packing junk in my trunk for the beach. TJ will slowly release sand across my shins where it sticks to the lake water rivulets. I will dig a moat, liking the symbolism, tiny armed men strategically placed. I will turn brown easily I will scratch a back I will eat a hot dog I will go swimming through hair I will fall in love with something new or more with something already probably both if at all at all possible cuz that’s how I like things and stick my nose in the purple smell of what I planted last year no more promising than a bulb, almost as certainly as I will grow old and die except sooner and more happily. So there.
When I was 3 years old and got a tonsillectomy and thus started remembering things (AHH!) and I thought “I like running” as one of my very first thoughts, and I still think that. In the back of my mind has for a long time been also, a childhood song from the same era of those very first thoughts, like Puff the Magic Dragon only not that, or something something, . . . and it’s about a kid and his dog. Even when I found Harry Nilsson’s “Are You Sleeping?” last year (and blogged it), it didn’t jog anything at all, but I’ve always remembered me and my arrow la la la, though I could never remember anything else about it; so since it seems every damn thing is on YouTube, I plugged that line in and up it popped: The Point, narrated by Ringo Star. What floors me is that, although I literally couldn’t reach to wipe my own ass yet, the point of The Point wrote itself on the wall of my brain so indelibly that I swear to god I have all these years felt and said some of these things over and over and over.
“guilty of living in our midst without a point” (with a dog) = good (and banished)
totally
When I was 3 years old and got a tonsillectomy and thus started remembering things (AHH!) and I thought “I like running” as one of my very first thoughts, and I still think that. In the back of my mind has for a long time been also, a childhood song from the same era of those very first thoughts, like Puff the Magic Dragon only not that, or something something, . . . and it’s about a kid and his dog. Even when I found Harry Nilsson’s “Are You Sleeping?” last year (and blogged it), it didn’t jog anything at all, but I’ve always remembered me and my arrow la la la, though I could never remember anything else about it; so since it seems every damn thing is on YouTube, I plugged that line in and up it popped: The Point, narrated by Ringo Star. What floors me is that, although I literally couldn’t reach to wipe my own ass yet, the point of The Point wrote itself on the wall of my brain so indelibly that I swear to god I have all these years felt and said some of these things over and over and over.
“guilty of living in our midst without a point” (with a dog) = good (and banished)
totally
Eddie Floyd + Mavis Staples: Piece of My Heart [Mavis always sounds like she’s calling on the Lord] {The Staple Singers} (Anybody got the Dusty Springfield version? Can’t find it.)
And a version of the real thing. MP3. (Anybody got a muscle car?)
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Louis Jordan - Knock Me a Kiss (highly recommended)
Anthropologists have not reached a consensus as to whether kissing is a learned or an instinctive behavior. It may be related to grooming behavior also seen between other animals, or arising as a result of mothers premasticating food for their children. [yummy] Women are subconsciously more attracted to men whose major histocompatibility complex portion of their genome is different than her own
Kissing is a complex behaviour that requires significant muscular coordination; in fact, a total of twenty muscles working cooperatively. [I hope I don’t remember that, it might throw me off.] The most important muscle involved is the orbicularis oris muscle
Notable kisses: At the Diocleia festival at Megara in honour of Diocles, lover of Philolaus, a kissing contest was held in which boys would kiss a male judge, who awarded a laurel wreath to the boy he deemed the best kisser. . . . In Lady and the Tramp, as Lady and Tramp simultaneously eat a spaghetti noodle from opposite ends, their lips meet in the middle. [She lets go, bashful. He rolls the last meatball to her with his nose.]
(bonus - Andain – Ave Maria)
Anthropologists have not reached a consensus as to whether kissing is a learned or an instinctive behavior. It may be related to grooming behavior also seen between other animals, or arising as a result of mothers premasticating food for their children. [yummy] Women are subconsciously more attracted to men whose major histocompatibility complex portion of their genome is different than her own
Kissing is a complex behaviour that requires significant muscular coordination; in fact, a total of twenty muscles working cooperatively. [I hope I don’t remember that, it might throw me off.] The most important muscle involved is the orbicularis oris muscle
Notable kisses: At the Diocleia festival at Megara in honour of Diocles, lover of Philolaus, a kissing contest was held in which boys would kiss a male judge, who awarded a laurel wreath to the boy he deemed the best kisser. . . . In Lady and the Tramp, as Lady and Tramp simultaneously eat a spaghetti noodle from opposite ends, their lips meet in the middle. [She lets go, bashful. He rolls the last meatball to her with his nose.]
(bonus - Andain – Ave Maria)
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Gotye - heartsamess [repost, but this is the video]
“A Distinctive Sound” – Gotye (high recommend. I like this a lot—what the hell is it?)
Virgo this week: In May 2005, while floating in a heated, heart-shaped swimming pool in Milan, Italy, Andrea Pedrani and Federica Di Venosa kissed underwater for 87 seconds. That's got to be a world record, right? If their mark is ever broken, I bet it will involve at least one Virgo and will happen in the next few weeks. By my reckoning, your tribe is in a phase when you're capable of peak performances in both the erotic arts and oceanic emotions; you're primed for transcendent acts of sensual pleasure and rich amusements in warm, watery depths.
[okay (pause) . . . (headtilt) . . ]
The baby is a water sign, Pisces, which flows into earth signs (i.e. Virgos), saturates and cannot easily extricate itself. Maybe that’s what he meant. (:/)
harvey mandel – wade in the water (great flowerfunk instrumental)
“A Distinctive Sound” – Gotye (high recommend. I like this a lot—what the hell is it?)
Virgo this week: In May 2005, while floating in a heated, heart-shaped swimming pool in Milan, Italy, Andrea Pedrani and Federica Di Venosa kissed underwater for 87 seconds. That's got to be a world record, right? If their mark is ever broken, I bet it will involve at least one Virgo and will happen in the next few weeks. By my reckoning, your tribe is in a phase when you're capable of peak performances in both the erotic arts and oceanic emotions; you're primed for transcendent acts of sensual pleasure and rich amusements in warm, watery depths.
[okay (pause) . . . (headtilt) . . ]
The baby is a water sign, Pisces, which flows into earth signs (i.e. Virgos), saturates and cannot easily extricate itself. Maybe that’s what he meant. (:/)
harvey mandel – wade in the water (great flowerfunk instrumental)
for the hell of it: Ave Maria (Mozart) [I wanted to like the Callas version better in honor of the heart-shaped pool, but I just didn't.]
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Lenny Kravitz – American Woman
(If you didn’t like the Vday post you might want to stop reading right about now. )
I’ve got this rental car counter SMILE routine. I can’t always muster it and it doesn’t always work, but if it catches then I get a free upgrade about half the time. I like to travel and I’m usually in a good mood doing it, at least going. So I’m not in a hurry. Everybody else is grumpy, or in family-travel mode (Junior mooning baby sis and picking his nose while dad stands nearby like a tombstone with a wallet and mom in her good ‘slacks’ tells the rental agent where they’re going like he gives a shit). I go Chinese: SMILE, but leisurely. Last time I got a SUV escapadey thing (I’m always booked for the Rental Flea, of course.) This time I got a Ford Mustang Turbo Coupe in Red (sweeeet). I wouldn’t want it every day, god no, but I definitely have a muscle car for a weekend doing 140 kph with Pearl Jam then Cake then Lenny on WXRT blowing my head off mood. It’s the perfect warm up for the mood named “Welcome to the World Baby Girl”:
I’ve got this rental car counter SMILE routine. I can’t always muster it and it doesn’t always work, but if it catches then I get a free upgrade about half the time. I like to travel and I’m usually in a good mood doing it, at least going. So I’m not in a hurry. Everybody else is grumpy, or in family-travel mode (Junior mooning baby sis and picking his nose while dad stands nearby like a tombstone with a wallet and mom in her good ‘slacks’ tells the rental agent where they’re going like he gives a shit). I go Chinese: SMILE, but leisurely. Last time I got a SUV escapadey thing (I’m always booked for the Rental Flea, of course.) This time I got a Ford Mustang Turbo Coupe in Red (sweeeet). I wouldn’t want it every day, god no, but I definitely have a muscle car for a weekend doing 140 kph with Pearl Jam then Cake then Lenny on WXRT blowing my head off mood. It’s the perfect warm up for the mood named “Welcome to the World Baby Girl”:
Violet (Letty) Annabelle
When we were little, my sister’s nickname was Henny Penny. Making me Chicken Little. My parents had zero parenting skills, and never got any, but they did have love (of a sort) and the one most important thing long haul: a sense of apt dark humor, i.e. wit.
So says Chicken Little, “Um the sky just fell on my sister.”
Here is the context: In the U.S. you have a legal right to 12 weeks off without losing your job, but not with pay. If you have health insurance, which you probably don’t, it will usually cover 80% of medical charges minus anything “optional” like pain medication, bringing the total of something like an emergency C-Section to a good 10k out of pocket. Health care is excellent, but spotty and brutal (for instance the surgeon comes in and says as an aside “ . . . you didn’t need the hysterectomy so that’s good”). Fewer and fewer women in an upper education and income bracket choose to have children at all (fine) and/but if they do, they will be overwhelmed themselves and be no help, might be riddled with snippy competitiveness (make that probably), and will almost certainly be no source of support or information for anything as nostalgic as breastfeeding. God forbid. And god forbid you should fail at that either, so says Oprah whatever. A woman here, in that context, will be half (or more) of her household income (great), and/but given that necessity will re-enter her career environment only to find that everyone expects her now to fail so that she has to be twice as competent in order to break even, and because she now has a whole new reason to neeeeeeed that money, she has to be NICE about it all to boot. Even the best of fathers (I looove my bro-in-law, good guy) will smell bad to the baby and even if he is willing to let the little bugger cry that out, the woman will not be (she can not—brainfry) and so he’ll hand the kid back, useless until it can cavort. At some point, the woman thinks: I need more sisters, sisters-in-law, cousins, anything. And so, though (because?) she’s totally screwed, she’ll not wish the same thing on her own new-beloved and will have another baby, probably quickly, hoping for better and dying into the future. She’s toast.
Add this: She will never, ever, not jump in fright again at a door slam. (AH!) She will (AH!) be fright(AH!)tened of every bus cra(AH!)sh possibility every (AH!) (AH!) tainted water (AH!) supply flu ep(AH!)idemic skin rash stolen (AH!) lunch money humiliati(AH!)on rape car acid(AH!)ident lack of (AHHHH!) God in the uni(AHAH!)verse lack of mercy of (weepysleepless) fate fucking dog bite whatever . . . like a cross between hiccups and a tazer to her testes if she had any left. Not ev(AH!)en a daffo(AH!)dil will be easy to love.
The conceptual framework doesn’t get any better: Losers have babies. White trash idiots. It is beneath a thinking person to stress the planet and foist egotism on existence. Nobody who has the capacity to reflect on it would condescend to do such a thing. I am deliberately not mentioning the matter-of-course insults to the body of pregnancy and whelping (pain, pain, pain [pain] breast infections, lung infections, fractured pelvis . . . just to the hit the highlights). Because if you think adoption gets you out of that conceptual framework in the United States, you are sadly mistaken. Did you miss the upshot of the Golden Pig Year, thinking I was having a Hallmark moment?: Very soon, buttgillions of buyers-remorse children, little girls, are going to hit the Clearance Racks of Asia. But. If you think swooping an unwanted child up will get you the slightest slack for the desire to parent, forget it. In fact, it will add a veil of self-congratulation to the whole thing, as if the egotism weren’t bad enough. Check it. I would bet my left bagel that nearly everyone reading this is currently in possession of an opinion about both Britney and Angelina, and if you were above watching the borderline animal hoarding “freak show” as a pundit, then how would you have that?
In America, you mostly are made to feel like you do not belong here, and you do not belong to the others who do not belong, either.
While we’re all avoiding thus asking ourselves if anyone has ever really loved us for no good reason since our mamas by implicitly condemning her for it, let me note that the welcome to my niece stands. [armscrossy] There are many pleasures of Being, mostly little random stuff like upgrades and processed meats and plotlines and listening to someone else sleep . . . one of my all time favorites: coming to a conclusion finally and thereafter not really caring to discuss it. Along with 40 fingers and toes, I’m sharing that with baby-Violet right now, both of us concertedly embracing that she IS.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
I told you the lizard was my type. He and I had a little thing. I wondered if he knew it too, or . . . He looked so tempting yet I got this vibe that he’d prefer not to be just ‘picked up’. I pretended not to be interested in doing so, while actually doing a little research on the subject. Still, he did edge closer and look me over as I talked softly to him and played some music. I wrote for a while, and he kept opening one of his eyes (“I’m sleeping, not looking, don’t get too excited”), pivoting it around and then resting it on me before he’d close it again. A bit aloof, yet unquestionably attractive. He inched down closer and into a more comfortable range of his lamp, warming up—one-eye check, recheck. (“Yup, still there.”)
And, he was a heartbreaker. If the autopsy shows that he was half Greek half Chinese half Russian Orthodox with OCPD and collections of odd and useless things including receipts and pointless facts as well as born under a difficult star sign, I’m not going to be in the least surprised.
For Papaya, may he rest in peace:
Paris Texas –I’ve got a Static Aesthetic - Bombs Away mix and I think and I think and therefore I wanna go grab a shovel so I can dig up the devil so I can ask him why la la
This loss early today put me on a different track for hours than I had planned. I went running as usual, but instead of my customary reveries I spent the time remembering Hammy the Hamster, who at the age of 5 (that’s apx 160 in hamster years) died an unnatural death that I can still barely talk about without getting v’klempt. (No, seriously.) I don’t collect cats (pulease), but a life without the experience of attaching to an animal is incomplete. So I stopped in at the out-of-the-way local pet store to buy some $6 choke-proof bull penises (yes, you heard that right) for Jasper, who is currently in charge of humanizing my home. The pet store isn’t really a pet store, because this is Buffalo. If you need that explained, you’re not going to understand it. Of course, they don’t sell lizards—they don’t sell pets of any kind, not even hamsters. But they can tell you, if you want to know, who the local hamster whisperer is. And of course there is one, THIS IS BUFFALO, where art is very widely defined and ‘artists’ of all kinds can afford grand impractical real estate. So, you guessed it, there is indeed a Buffalo Lizard Man. (I just had to ask.)
No, I didn’t want a lizard. Yes, there is an ice storm raging sideways here today. And I had work to do. So, of course, I spent the afternoon with The Lizard Man, who’s name is John Crocitto Jr. of ‘CroZoo’, a tiny storefront in Black Rock wherein you can get all sorts of lizards and lizard lore, or a chinchilla baby (brand new, just born there, so you’d have to wait) or a rescued kangaroo (no, seriously). His dad was sitting at the register reading a book with a bird perched on his head (seriously). Jr. is a zoologist in a pulled down ski hat and a heavy metal t-shirt who can tell you a buttgillion lizard facts at dizzying speed. No lizards have been truly domesticated (as in milked? dunno), although the orange bearded gecko comes closest. I was attracted to the knight anole (Cuban) babies, which are the ‘starter chameleons’ and who changed from luscious green to brown spotted before my eyes while nose-nudging the glass at me. But they get really big and live a looooong time, so might not be good if you have any “commitment issues”. The albino and other striped geckos were a little hissyfitty. The pygmy chameleon blended so well that I kept having to blink—one of the few kinds that can thrive without cross ventilation because of its natural habitat in undergrowth. Having made the rounds and discussed the drawbacks of water turtle keeping vs tortoise habits at length as an aside, he brought out his prize girl, an adult crested gecko in a lovely shade of chartreuse. The only drawback to this lizard is if you pull its tail it’ll come off, which can be a bit of a shock to you both. Still, this one had been to thousands of kindergarten classes and still had her ass. She also had sticky paws that helped her climb up her tiny indoor repelling wall impressively and that looked like little poker playing hands. I asked what her name was. “Well she’s never told me her name,” he said, “but when we take her on outreach shows, we call her Sarah.”
I’m a one-pet woman generally. I only bought the Crested Gecko book. But you have to admit, that baby-Sarah is fetching. They’ve got little eyelashes and lick their eyes at you, sluuuurpwink.